Marshall Crenshaw

Marshall Crenshaw is one of my all time favorite songwriters. The singer/multi-instrumentalist is a tunesmith of the first order and an artist I continually go back to when I'm choosing songs for a radio show or an album for the living room.

MC is also a radio deejay whose Saturday night show, "The Bottomless Pit," aired on WFUV until the end of 2017. It was a great window into his musical mind and an educational as well as an entertaining romp. The reason he put his show on hiatus at that time was to pursue creating a documentary about the record producer Tom Wilson.

Like me, Marshall is also a vinyl enthusiast and as I was looking over my Marshall Crenshaw wax to choose something to play as a tip of the cap on his birthday on November 11, I realized I had his number in my phone. Why not give him a call?

It was a good notion as, of course, it was a pleasure to speak with him and I'm proud of him for following through on his dream to make the film. His subject matter is sensational and I can't wait to see it.

Here's what he said about Wilson after the phone call: "When you look at all the bullet point stuff in Tom Wilson's legacy, it's all music that's designed to free people's minds; that was his agenda, or at least part of it. Over and over again, he let genies out of their bottles, with Sun Ra, Cecil Taylor, and all the other modern and avant-garde jazz that he was involved with, and then with Dylan, Simon & Garfunkel, the Velvet Underground, Frank Zappa, all the rest. The last album project he did was a Gil Scott-Heron album, so he stayed on that path."

[Aired: 11/11/20]